Inside Photoshop

Tips to keep your digital images noise-free

by Stephen Dow

This is a great question, as digital noise is one of the biggest problems faced by digital photographers. The good news is that you can avoid it. The first thing to do is consider your ISO setting. Higher ISO settings tend to display more digital noise than digital images taken at lower ISO settings. The fix is to lower this setting to ISO 200 or ISO 100, if possible, which reduces the camera’s sensitivity to light. But this isn’t always the cause of noise. While avoiding noise might be impossible, here are few other suspects to consider when trying to quiet down your noisy images:

Underexposed images. If an image sensor can’t get enough light to capture an accurate reading, it’s likely to misinterpret the signal and produce noise. This can be fixed by increasing your exposure compensation or your shutter speed.

Blue skies. For very technical reasons, digital cameras and blue skies don’t get along. First, the subtle color shifts and large areas of uniform color can cause noise to develop as the sensor tries to reproduce the gentle gradient. Another factor is the infrared filter on most CCD sensors, which tends to increase the sensitivity to the[…]